Spring is raw for us so far.  Where we were for the last one, what isn’t, etc.

But still it compels us to smile, the warm spring air.  We look for hawks as we drive, living these lives that we could have never seen.

Is there a way to un-hope for something?  If so, I’m living it.  So now I don’t do hope.  I just do givens, realities, nows.

I’m living a series of nows that must remain distinct from everything that came before and anything that might happen next.

Other terrible things probably await down the path of my life.  But I’m sure stupendous beauty and ridiculous fun is somewhere out there, too.

I’m just worried about the timing.

Too many flying bags of flaming shit directly in the face can really beat a man down.  So it’s time for better things to start getting better and being more awesome.

Directly.

I want to get things straightened out and cleaned up, but then I just sit back down here at the computer or out on the couch or often in my car and I just go through the World.  Go.  Do.  Forward.  Get. Things. Done.  Whatever is the next thing in front of me, that’s what I do.

This weekend while away in the woods, all I could do was read.  I read in the yard and on the porch and almost walking up the hiking trail, too, but mostly I read.  I had to have it all in my head instead of just there in my hands.  I can’t do anything with it if it’s still in the book.

Then to bed.  Bed is dangerous.  Horizontal hopes send my stomach gurgling and my mind whirling.  Upright and walking I wander through the day observing the anxious actions of my physical self.  There I go getting shit done.  How the eff do I do it, I wonder, my mind wild and tight.

We walked in the woods this weekend and I put my book away long enough to look around and hit the trail and get some breath and sweat.  There were long, warm views from atop the mountain and crisp early-spring shadows still laced with snow.  I didn’t have much to add to the group’s banter and conversation because I was brooding through the woods.

It was nothing specific beyond Silas and everything that is my life now.  No particular worry or newly bad situation rumbled around my brain.  A pervasive sadness just filled me even as I relished the thrum of turkey vultures taking off, fleeing my mad dash down the trail around knobby roots and small, firm trees.  Old leaves covered every inch of the forest floor, giving each step the potential for slip.  But I got winded before I tripped and fell.  Lucky me.

For a few moments I was alone in the woods in the rustling quiet of nature.  I listened and looked and stood slightly sweating in the cool arboreal shade waiting and wondering for what was next.  Not just the next moment, but the next everything.  For a moment I thought about what our lives might look like if we had another child, but I couldn’t focus on that thought for long.

I was worried and hopeful throughout Lu’s pregnancy but those thoughts and fears seem vastly inadequate to the magnitude of what happened.  So I don’t bother with them anymore.  Our lives will be whatever they are whenever that happens, and there was not much I could about it out there on the mountain, in the woods, briefly alone in the chilly spring air.

My muscles were atrophied from lassitude and grief but they kept me moving through the trees until I found the perfect spot to stop and wait.

The breeze across the sweat of my back sent me shivering.

I listened to my soul missing my son by hearing the subtle sounds of the life around me.

My wife and brothers and family and nephew snapped and crackled into my range, their laughter and conversation a beacon for my worn and tattered spirit.  I waited for them on a rock above the trail, hiding in the glare of the sun.

Silas is hidden in the glare of my pain and grief.  I need to have him close, but missing him burns my mind to a crisp.

Once they found me I walked with Lu’s hand in mine and we didn’t have to say a thing because we both knew what the other was thinking.  I hope Silas knows too, somehow.

Back home I picked up my book and read some more.  I had to have it all in my head because now, not knowing is worse than anything.